SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 April 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
Site updated on 20 April 2026
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Watson, Ian
(1943-2026) UK teacher and author who lectured in English in Tanzania (1965-1967) and Tokyo (1967-1970) before beginning to publish sf with "Roof Garden Under Saturn" for New Worlds in 1969; he then taught Future Studies for six years at Birmingham Polytechnic, taking there one of the first academic courses in sf in the UK; he became a full-time writer in 1976, publishing around 200 short stories since 1969 at a gradually increasing tempo and with visibly ...
Starlost, The
Canadian tv series, syndicated by CTV (1973). Executive producers Douglas Trumbull, Jerry Zeitman. Produced by William Davidson. Series created Cordwainer Bird (pseudonym of Harlan Ellison). Technical advisor Ben Bova. Cast includes Keir Dullea, William Osler, Gay Rowen and Robin Ward. One season of 17 50-minute episodes. Colour. / This series about life on a vast ...
Zito, V M
(? - ) US advertising agency executive and author of The Return Man (2012), a Near Future Post-Holocaust novel set in the Evacuated States of western America four years after the now traditional Zombie holocaust has split America apart: gonzo zombies out West, which has become a no-man's-land, while the Safe States back East have been crushed into ...
Wright, Vincent
(? -? ) UK author of whom nothing is known beyond his sf novel, An Ancient Englishman: A D 1599-1906 [for subtitle see Checklist below] (1907), structured as the memoir of Geoffrey Grenville, a sixteenth-century warrior Hero. After battling the Spanish on land and sea, he comes to London, where the Earl of Southampton introduces him to William Shakespeare, to whom he recounts his ...
Forbidden Lines
US Semiprozine published by Paul B Thompson, Chapel Hill, North Carolina and edited by Charles Overbeck supported by an editorial board consisting of a student-based writers' group at the University of North Carolina. It ran for 16 letter-size issues from October/November 1990 to Summer 1994, initially bimonthly but irregular after Fall 1992. The magazine began because the writers' group felt there were insufficient markets in the US for sf/fantasy and those few ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...